Oh Canada!! Editorial for discussion.

[MarcO]

I enjoyed reading this, thought some of you may also. Some pertinent points.

I like the direction Canada is going in.

The new Canada? Hardly: Just growing up

Kiss that shook the nation sign of revolt

JIM COYLE

TORONTO STAR

Every revolution needs an icon. The dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall. The less spontaneous, but still stirring tumble of Saddam's statue in Baghdad. Some action, some image, that distills seismic change into one defining moment.

In typically Canadian fashion, ours was a little more subdued and, well, more than a little odd.

Who'd have imagined that the relentless liberalizing of Canada, a country known (if at all) for natural ruggedness and gap-toothed hockey players, would come to be defined by a photo of two slight, middle-aged gay men in conservative suits toasting each other with champagne glasses after marrying in downtown Toronto.

Call it the Beaver Pelt Revolution.

Call it Rebellion by Degrees.

Call it whatever you like.

But increasingly in Canada, once regarded as among the more prudish, uptight and regulated places in the free world, it is possible for consenting adults to do pretty much what they like as long as they don't frighten the horses.

In the past few weeks, the steady relaxing of social attitudes, the quiet undoing of the established order of things, has been reflected in the courts and has even galvanized Parliament into action.

In May, a Superior Court justice ruled that possession of less than 30 grams of marijuana is not against the law in Ontario. Within two weeks, federal Justice Minister Martin Cauchon introduced legislation decriminalizing possession of as many as 30 marijuana joints.

In early June, the Ontario Court of Appeal deemed the exclusion of gays from the institution of marriage unjustifiable and offensive. Within a week, the federal government said it would draft a law to legalize homosexual marriage.

In Canada, we have a prime minister who prefers giving peace a chance to campaigns of shock and awe.

In Canada, instead of a war on drugs fought between wars on Third World countries, we have harm-reduction programs that allow addicts to exchange their needles in order to reduce collateral damage.

In Canada, in parts anyway, it is possible for gay couples to adopt children.

In Canada, we long ago stopped killing fellow citizens in the name of the state.

We've come a long way, baby, from the days that lads and ladies drank in different parts of the beer parlour. Or when comics like Dudley Moore could say that when he thought of Canada he thought of tonic water.

Maybe the reason we export so many comics is that we had so much time to practise at our own expense. Canada was formed by the last ice age, the gag goes. After that, things slowed down.

Well, things have been moving pretty quickly lately — so much so, in fact, more than a few resident right-wingers, provincial governments and horrified neighbours to the south have been feeling a little seasick and all but screaming for Gravol.

One local official told the New York Times that Toronto is coming to be regarded as "the new Las Vegas."

Others have been less impressed.

In the runup to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, one or another of the innumerable and indistinguishable U.S. evangelists of the right — the sorts who not infrequently end up with mistresses, or gambling habits, or jail terms — called us "Soviet Canuckistan."

In the manner of his type, he may have somewhat overstated matters.

But we do increasingly seem to be some sort of blissed-out Amsterdam run by a peace-loving Swiss in which it has been determined for good the state has no place either in the bedroom, or in saying who can and can't get hitched.

The notion of state-free bedrooms goes back, of course, to the late Pierre Trudeau, the hippie-dippy prime minister who drove some of his presidential counterparts (not to mention numbers of his own countrymen) to distraction.

It was Trudeau who planted the seed for much of this court-led social change by giving Canada the controversial Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For all the moaning about law-by-judges and what the Charter has wrought, what the courts have given governments are generally loath to later take away.

(Though it should be noted that the vexed leadership of Alberta is stamping its cowboy-booted foot in fury and threatening to use the notwithstanding clause to protect itself from the weapon of planetary destruction it considers gay marriage to be.)

It's not that Canada, like most of the Western world, hasn't on some levels lurched right in recent years. In the wake of the Thatcher revolution that swept Britain and the Reagan revolution in the U.S., Canadians also elected neo-conservative governments such as that of Mike Harris in Ontario, whose Common Sense Revolution borrowed liberally from economic and policy platforms of numerous Republican governors.

What Harris pointedly didn't adopt, however, was either the goals or rhetoric of Family Values social conservatism so common in America. For one thing, the marital records and court battles of some of his key ministers over such unpleasantness as child support to former mistresses made such posturing impractical. For another, in a country of far less overt religiosity, there seemed no market for it here.

By and large, backers of Harris and leaders like him had a more libertarian strain. They no more wanted the government to be society's nanny, ruling on morals and sexuality and intoxicant of choice, than they wanted the taxman in their wallets.

In his 1995 book The Canadian Revolution, Peter C. Newman tracked a rampaging new mood of defiance in the last generation that he says has altered our views of society, politics and power.

Defeat of first the Meech Lake constitutional accord, then the Charlottetown Accord that sought to patch over its shortcomings, provided a taste for not being dictated to.

And just as immigration changed the face of Canada, it has revived its entrepreneurial spirit and tempered the social rigidity and intolerance that formerly defined the country.

Now pollster Michael Adams, in his book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, says people in the two countries are becoming increasingly different, rather than increasingly alike.

He says an initially conservative country like Canada has ended up producing "an autonomous, inner-directed, flexible, tolerant, socially liberal, and spiritually eclectic people."

While an initially liberal society like the U.S. has ended up producing people who are, relatively speaking, "materialistic, outward-directed, intolerant, socially conservative, and deferential to traditional institutional authority."

Canada, it seems, is truly a distinct society. And no value, Adams said, is more highly valued than autonomy, "at every level from the individual right up to the nation."

In fact, Adams' conclusions are enough to make us actually sing the national anthem loud enough for the guy standing next to us at the hockey game to hear.

Increasingly, he says, Canada is a "peaceful microcosm of the entire world ... Canada is becoming the home of a unique post-modern, post-material multiculturalism, generating hardy strains of new hybrids that will enrich this country and many others in the world."

Perhaps all this has fuelled a new confidence. After all, in recent weeks and months we have seen what would previously have been regarded as utterly unCanadian bursts of assertiveness.

Most notably, the Prime Minister declined President George W. Bush's invitation to the time-of-his-choosing ball in Iraq.

When local leaders thought they'd been done a dirty by the World Health Organization over a travel ban issued against Toronto, they did not take it lying down, but flew off to Geneva to speak up and defend themselves.

Just recently, the Prime Minister had the temerity to boast at the G-8 summit that Canada's economic record in recent years was as good as anyone's, and certainly better than George Bush's.

It seems we're all grown up and intent on doing things our way, whether or not the Americans like the idea of their young people coming up to Woodstock North to toke up or, in the case of gays, tie the knot.

Or put another way ...

You're not the boss of us, George.

[Tooly]

quote:

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You're not the boss of us, George.

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HERE HERE!!!

[Ms.Huxtable]

That's a great read MarcO, thanks for posting it.

I have always been a proud Canadian, but in the past couple of years, my pride has escalated as a result of the many liberal ideas our government has embraced. Autonomy is indeed encouraged by our goverment as of late. Same-sex marriages? WOW!! What a privledge it is to live here. That is huge on so many levels!

[bradm]

One thing to remember is that the upcoming vote on the (re)definition of marriage in Parliament is going to be free vote. This means that each member will not have to take the party line on the vote, but can vote his/her opinion/conscience.

This means that voicing your opinion to your member of parliament could have a real effect on the vote.

To find your MP, go here and enter your postal code, then let your MP know what you think. Remeber, your MP is there to represent you regardless of whether you voted for him or her.

Aloha,

Brad

[snarfmaster C]

yeah, i'm liking the way canada's been headed lately. it felt good to be a part of the rallies against the war in iraq - even better to know that our government didn't cave to bush's agenda... not yet anyway. this star wars thing is scary though. i think writing a letter to your mp about our potential involvement in that is pretty important too.

peace

[arcane]

I'll be happier when the Ontario government stops quietly tossing certain bankrupt people in jail, where they're held *without charge* for 90 days.

And you thought debtors' prisons don't exist. They do in Ontario.

[paisley]

Yay Canada!

very proud of the independent decisions lately... my kind of country

far as Ontario goes, Mike Harris' regime is almost done... don't forget to vote!

(good point on talking to your MP, its suprising what those people can do for you but they can't read your mind)

[arcane]

The thing is, the Harris stuff needs to be *un*done. It won't go away by itself, and the system is deliberately ignoring the people most affected by the nastiness. I don't see any politicos willing to take on the problem, either.

[Vermontdave]

Proposition # 8675/309, having been dually noted, gives all Canadian people, by desire of many in the states, the ability to;

1a: think

2b:rationalize

3c: problem-solve

'smart people up canada way'

'up noth?'

'yuh'

(overheard)

peace